Wildlife study should be wake-up call to cat owners

There's a killer on the loose in Western North Carolina, a mass murderer responsible for the deaths of countless residents of the mountains, a violent assassin with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for slaughter, a predator that stalks and kills for the thrill of doing so.

Before you run and bolt the front door to keep some real-world version of the fictional character Hannibal Lecter from busting in, realize that the natural-born killer in question here is not human. Nor are its victims.

The serial killer we're talking about is the common house cat. And the casualties are the innumerable small mammals and birds that fall prey to the killing kitties each and every day.

A recent study by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the average annual number of deaths of birds and mammals in the United States caused by domestic cats is 14.7 billion individuals. That's billion with a "b."

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, implicates cats as being responsible for the extinction of 33 species of wildlife and as the No. 1 source of direct, human-caused bird mortality in the United States. Other bird mortality sources include collisions with windows, buildings, communication towers and vehicles, and pesticide poisoning.

Researchers say the feline-related wildlife deaths are actually "human-caused" because people are responsible for domesticating cats and letting them roam outdoors, either as house cats that spend a lot of their time outside the house, or as strays, farm and barn animals, and cats that are completely feral.

"Why care if Tabby takes down a few dozen mice or chipmunks?" you may be wondering. It's because those creatures play a valuable role in the ecosystem, serving as a primary source of food for birds of prey such as hawks, eagles and owls.

George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservatory, says the findings illustrate the need for action.

"The very high credibility of this study should finally put to rest the misguided notions that outdoor cats represent some harmless, new component to the natural environment. The carnage that outdoor cats inflict is staggering and can no longer be ignored or dismissed. This is a wake-up call for cat owners and communities to get serious about this problem before even more ecological damage occurs," Fenwick says.

Now, we're not proposing that state wildlife officials put a bounty on the heads of cats, as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians did with coyotes last year as a way to help deal with their exploding population. What we are proposing is that cat owners take more responsibility for preventing their pets from continuing their killing sprees.

Keep your cats indoors as much as possible and keep a watchful eye on them when you do let them outside. Spay or neuter your pet so that, should old Tom go tom-catting through the neighbor, there is not another batch of strays a couple of months later. And local governments across the region and the country should take steps to gather the millions of unowned cats, seek adoptions and euthanize those that are not adoptable.

Admittedly, the last part of the solution won't sit well with many animal lovers, says Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor who studies human-animal relations, who points out there actually are two invasive predators decimating American wildlife, both of them pets gone amok.

"The first are feral cats," Herzog says. "The others are the Burmese pythons that in the last 10 years have killed off nearly 90 percent of the bobcats, raccoons, possums, rabbits and deer in the Everglades.

While Americans get in a twit about trapping and killing the cats that are killing off billions of birds and mammals, they applaud the slaughter of giant snakes - which, like the feral cats - are the offspring of animals that were household pets."

The bottom line is responsible pet ownership. Now, if giant Burmese pythons find their way to the WNC mountains, there's a reason to run and bolt the front door.

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Wildlife study should be wake-up call to cat owners

There's a killer on the loose in Western North Carolina, a mass murderer responsible for the deaths of countless residents of the mountains, a violent assassin with a seemingly unquenchable thirst